Conrad's Dream of a Common Language: Lacan and “The Secret Sharer”

Literary critics readily use psychoanalytic theory to illuminate literary texts, but literature can also be used to clarify theory. Lacan's use of fiction to articulate his theories offers a precedent for examining the connections between theory and text in either direction. He reads Poe's “The Purloined Letter” for its psychoanalytic knowledge, using the text as a “theory of a symptom or complex” (Johnson and Garber, 1987, p. 630).1 Joseph Conrad's short story “The Secret Sharer” can serve this function for Lacan as it has for so many other theories. Both specific and suggestive, the story is so widely anthologized and so variously interpreted that it would be absurd to argue that Lacan is the key to understanding it. I would claim instead that the story helps us understand Lacan's theory of the subject's entry into the Symbolic order.

Conrad's ideas about language were no simpler than Lacan's. Heir to the subjectivist epistemology of the late nineteenth century, Conrad did not regard language as a neutral medium of intersubjective communication. He could neither believe in verbal communication nor renounce it as his rhetorical goal. In his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” , Conrad stated his purpose in thoroughly rhetorical terms: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” This quest to move the reader, however, was burdened by his subjectivist creed: “Another man's truth is only a dismal lie to me. … You can see now how little anything I may say is worth to anybody” (Karl and Davies, 1981, p. 253). If truth were subjective, how could he control what another would “see”? Even if he could articulate his own perception, how would another understand his meaning?